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Futurology #133: big ice, little ice
Monday, 01 March 2010
Haiti internet lessons deployed for Chile: When Chile experienced it's massive weekend earthquake, just hours after the event online disaster relief sites were up to aid the survivors, reports O'Reilly Radar.Google quickly sprang into action reusing many Haiti built-tools:
Crisis Response, the portal for all of Google's efforts, lets people donate to victims, track the news and view the latest maps.
Person Finder: Chile Earthquake, built on Google's AppEngine, aims to let people enter and retrieve information about people on the ground. It has an API and rich search functonality. News organizations agreed to update Google's application in an attempt to create a central repository (to avoid the conflicting data issues that happened in the wake of Katrina).
Google's Mapmaker, a Mapmaker Download, allows you to map the world from home then releases the data under licensing that enables NGOs and relief organizations to use it.
Comment — Chileans in NZ want better phone access to find relatives in Chile.
Luxembourg's icy proxy may change global currents: A massive iceberg has broken off Antarctica and is stuck in a position that could cause global ocean currents to change dramatically. That would affect everything from shipping lanes to animal migration.
The iceberg broke off from the Mertz Glacier last month, and has since lodged in a position where it is blocking heavy, ultracold water from circulating. Normally this denser water moves out from the glacier-strewn antarctic into the ocean, driving the motion of the currents familiar to humans and migrating sea creatures for millennia, reports IO9.
Comment — more sharks, jellyfish in places they shouldn't be?
You are who you are – on Facebook, anyway: College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealised versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.
Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies, but US researchers like Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, dispute Back's findings.
Comment — revise profile immediately!
Ignore the forrest, study the trees for biodiversity clues: A painstaking, multidecade study of 33,000 individual trees may finally have uncovered the roots of biodiversity.
Since scientists still don’t quite understand why one place has more species than another, or fewer, but new data points out that species seem to be sharing. Wired has that one.
Comment — there are enough niches to go around after all.
Relocate that crime hotspot using maths: A new mathematical model suggests some areas will be repeatedly hit hard with crime, while police intervention can shut down lawlessness and keep it down. But for others, police involvement just shifts the trouble around, reports Wired.
“If you see a hot area of crime, you want to know: If you send the police in, will that displace the crime or get rid of the crime altogether?” said Andrea Bertozzi, a mathematician at UCLA who presented the new model Feb. 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We were able to predict the ability to suppress or otherwise displace hot spots.”
The results will also appear February 22nd in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Comment — what if you happen to live in that area of crime?
Internet predictor site: Recordedfuture.com is a new web site that searches for predictions the web over and aggregates them into trends and visuals. You fill out three boxes, says Smart Planet – “what, who/where and when” – and up come the predictions based on what’s been forecast by bloggers, research firms, news junkies and all-around oracles. An example used in a Youtube video is what companies are expanding (the what) in India (the where) in 2009 (the when and obviously not the future anymore).
Comment — when will I make more money?
Nike South Africa World Cup Shirts made from recycled bottles: Nike's move to make this summer's World Cup shirts out of recycled plastic bottles. The shirts will be worn by all nine Nike-sponsored teams, including England, Brazil, Portugal, and Holland.
Recycled polyester comes from a Taiwanese supplier that cuts up, melts, and spins plastic bottles into a yarn for the shirts. Each shirt will consist of 100% recycled polyester using approximately eight plastic bottles. The shirts are slightly more expensive to produce than standard jerseys, but Nike claims that the costs ultimately even out because less material is needed for production. (Picture credit – cover of the NZ Coaches' Manual)
Comment — how do the shirts handle sweating, though?
Tiny ice device for stroke treatment: A tiny device placed inside a central vein can safely refrigerate blood as it flows through stroke patients, lowering their temperature and raising the possibility that they might gain brain protection from hypothermia without having to be packed in ice, reports Wired.
Comment — the faster stroke victims get treatment the better.
